Caustic dust health hazard report, Feb 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

. "If we had known at the time exactly how caustic the dust could be, we would have been in a better position to make informed decisions about respiratory , ., protection to recommend and about the urgency of ensuring that workers and residents followed those recommendations," Shufro said.

"It is inexcusable for EPA to have kept silent for so long about such a potential hazard."

Dust weakens strapping youth

John Healy Jr. is 15, big, taller than his father. He looks as strong as a bull. But when he talks, wheezes and deep coughs punctuate his words. He and his father, John, live in an apartment overlooking what was the World Trade Center.

"Something is tearing him up, hitting his lungs hard," said his father. "He had asthma when he was younger, but he was fine until after Sept 11. If I knew the dust was that caustic, there's no way 1 would have brought him back here."

John goes to Stuyvesant High School, a 10-story building for the brightest of the bright. It's one block from the collapsed buildings and beside the Hudson River, where barges are being filled with debris destined for sorting at the Fresh Kills landfill.

"I need to go to this school, and I need to live here to do it, but something in that dust is just hurting me," the teen said as he looked down at the pile of pills, throat sprays and inhalers in his two large hands.

His father looked out the narrow dining room window at the brightly lighted carnage bellow. A light film of dust coated the window.

"I can't understand why the government didn't tell us what was actually in the dust," Healy said. "Were they afraid we were going to panic? I needed that information to decide what was best for my son. I needed it"

The teen's malady and other serious problems are being seen by physicians throughout New York.

"What we're finding is incredible irritation to the lungs, throat and nasal passages," said Herbert, from Mount Sinai. "Some of the tissue is cherry red, vivid, bright, and we've never seen anything like it before.

'There are a large number of clinicians and public health specialists who are struggling to reconcile the health problems they're seeing with the exposure data they're being given," Herbert said. 'The high pH in the dust may be a part of the answer. If the government had these pH readings of 11 and 12, the public and their physicians should have been told.

"Any credible information the government had relating to health issues just should have been released," she said. "There is no justification for holding it. You don't conceal the information from those who need it."

A dubious honor

Mark Rushing and Tori Bunch have the debatable honor of having lived in one of the sites that USGS tested. In fact, their apartment on the 30th floor of a building overlooking the World Trade Center tied for highest pH -12.1 - of the dozens of sites where samples were collected.

"Its obvious to those of us living here that the government - city, state and federal - wanted things to return to normal as quickly as possible. The economic losses were great," Rushing said. "But no matter how you view it, thats no excuse for the government, any government, to conceal hazards from 3

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